Textual Events

Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece

Edited by Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips

Departs from recent approaches to Greek lyric within social, political, and ritual contexts to explore frameworks which focus instead on formal features and poetic effects
Includes a detailed introductory overview of the subject to orient readers at all levels of study
Draws on a wide range of interpretative methodologies
Offers close readings of several major texts and authors, including Sappho, Alcaeus, and Pindar

Textual Events

Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece

Edited by Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips

Description

Recent decades have seen a major expansion in our understanding of how early Greek lyric functioned in its social, political, and ritual contexts, and the fundamental role song played in the day-to-day lives of communities, groups, and individuals has been the object of intense study. This volume places its focus elsewhere, and attempts to illuminate poetic effects that cannot be captured in functional terms alone. Employing a range of interpretative methods, it explores the idea of lyric performances as 'textual events'. Some chapters investigate the pragmatic relationship between real performance contexts and imaginative settings, while others consider how lyric poems position themselves in relation to earlier texts and textual traditions, or discuss the distinctive encounters lyric poems create between listeners, authors, and performers. Individual lyric texts and authors, such as Sappho, Alcaeus, and Pindar, are analysed in detail, alongside treatments of the relationship between lyric and the Homeric Hymns.

Building on the renewed concern with the aesthetic in the study of Greek lyric and beyond, Textual Events aims to re-examine the relationship between the poems' formal features and their historical contexts. Lyric poems are a type of socio-political discourse, but they are also objects of attention in themselves. They enable reflection on social and ritual practices as much as they are embedded within in them, but as well as expressing cultural norms, lyric challenges listeners to think about and experience the world afresh.

Textual Events

Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece

Edited by Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips

Frontmatter
List of Abbreviations
List of Contributors
1. Introduction, Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips
I: Occasionality
2. Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric: The Case of Sappho, Giambattista D Alessio
3. Sailing and Singing: Alcaeus at Sea, Anna Uhlig
4. Materialities of Political Commitment? Textual Events, Material Culture, and Metaliterarity in Alcaeus, David Fearn
5. What is a Setting?, G. O. Hutchinson
II: Conceptual Contexts
6. Sappho and Cyborg Helen, Tim Whitmarsh
7. Event and Artefact: The Homeric Hymn to Apollo, Archaic Lyric, and Early Greek Literary History, Henry Spelman
8. Hermetically Unsealed: Lyric Genres in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, Oliver Thomas
9. Polyphony, Event, Context: Pindar, Paean 9, Tom Phillips
III: Lyric Encounters
10. Echo and the Invention of the Lyric Listener, Pauline A. LeVen
11. Lyric Minds, Felix Budelmann
12. Fidelity and Farewell: Pindar's Ethics as Textual Events, Mark Payne
Endmatter
Works Cited
Index

Textual Events

Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece

Edited by Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips

Author Information

Felix Budelmann, Associate Professor of Classical Languages and Literature, University of Oxford,Tom Phillips, Supernumerary Fellow, Merton College, Oxford

Felix Budelmann is Associate Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Oxford. He has previously taught at the University of Manchester and the Open University, and his research focuses on Greek literature, especially lyric and tragedy.

Following graduate work at the University of Oxford, Tom Phillips was a Junior Research Fellow at Merton College (2013-16). He is currently working on the Leverhulme-funded project 'Anachronism and Antiquity', and his research focuses on lyric, Hellenistic poetry, and ancient scholarship.

Contributors:

Felix Budelmann is Associate Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Oxford.
Giambattista D'Alessio is Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Naples, 'Federico II'.
David Fearn is Reader in Greek Literature at the University of Warwick.
G. O. Hutchinson is Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford.
Pauline A. LeVen is Associate Professor of Classics at Yale University.
Mark Payne is Professor in the Department of Classics and the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.
Tom Phillips is Supernumerary Fellow at Merton College, Oxford.
Henry Spelman is the WHD Rouse Junior Research Fellow at Christ's College, Cambridge.
Oliver Thomas is an Assistant Professor in Classics at the University of Nottingham.
Anna Uhlig is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of California, Davis.
Tim Whitmarsh is the second A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge.

Textual Events

Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece

Edited by Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips

Reviews and Awards

"[I] was impressed with the clarity and utility of the concept of textual events editors Budelmann and Phillips present ... [this book] offers its readers a cautious methodological synthesis with an astonishing degree of flex and sway ... form[s] an impressive and clarion whole." -- Dennis R. Alley, Bryn Mawr Classical Review